A SERIES OF IMAGES ABOUT YOULina Selander13/9 — 23/11

A SERIES OF IMAGES ABOUT YOULina Selander13/9 — 23/11 2014 Curator: Helena HolmbergThe exhibition is produced in collaboration with Kunsthall Trondheim

FOREWORD

Lina Selander belongs to a new, interesting generation of artists.

They are united by an approach that embraces a diversity of

aspects in the artistic work. In Selander’s case it involves a mix

of science, poetry, society, history, and a meta-narrative that has

to do with seeing and the actual situation in which we take part

of the work, in equal parts and with respect for the entire com-

plexity of the existence. Art can be true only if allowed to deal

with several things at once. On the contrary, it does not mean

that her art is difficult to approach. It is highly visual and as-

sumes full confidence in us as viewers. There is no right reading

of her work, just a series of challenging opportunities.

In A Series of Images About You, Selander tin collaboration with

curator Helena Holmberg has put together four different instal-

lations from 2007 to this year, which together constitute the first

major presentation of her art. The exhibition also contains an

“archive” of individual films and a number of books by Lina Se-

lander. The books should be seen as Artist Books rather than as

“exhibition catalogues”, i.e. they are independent projects in the

form of books, in various ways relating to her other artistic work.

As curator this is the third exhibition Helena Holmberg is con-

tributing to Kalmar konstmuseum. In this case also as director

for Kunsthall Trondheim where Lina Selanders Sylphium was

exhibited this spring. Helena Holmberg has previously curated

Encounters by Manon de Boer (2013) and the group exhibition

A Complicated Relation, part I (2012). It’s invaluable to have

partners with initiated and dedicated knowledge, her work

adds to the growth of both the museum and the art. We are

deeply grateful.

A very warm regard to Lina Selander for preparing this exhibi-

tion and for the confidence she has shown Kalmar konstmuseum

through this. It is with pleasure we offer Kalmar County, Sweden

and the world, an opportunity to learn more about an art of a

particularly concerned interest.

Bengt Olof Johansson, Museum Director

A SERIES OF IMAGES ABOUT YOU

SILPHIUM

In the first sequences of the film a story is told about the

ancient, now extinct, plant silphium. The plant grew on the

coast outside the North African town Cyrene – a settlement

of Greeks from the over populated island of Thera in 630 BC

– which became the main town in the Greek colony, situated

in today’s Libya. The plant was famous for it’s medical usage

(it was used as a contraceptive and abortifacient) and for it’s

richness in flavour, which made it the base of the colony’s ex-

port. Its importance for the economic wealth was so crucial

that the image of silphium was imprinted on the coins. When

exploitation of the plant led to extinction, the city declined. As

is often the case in Selander’s works, the film builds on layers

of images and meaning, layers that link history and pre-history

to contemporary society, and in which nature as a prerequisite

for life is one of the focal points. The human strive for devel-

opment and expansion, the desire for control over nature, and

above all – visual control, depiction and surveillance, is always

met by another contradicting force. The nature looks back at

us, its eyes empty – a reoccurring image in the film. 

In Silphium this double movement of visual and earthly mastery

and its opposite – loss of visual control, awareness of vulner-

ability – is first expressed in a shot of the famous 16th century

Silphium (2014)HD-video, 22 mins, b/w, mute and sound

painting The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein. The ambassadors

are depicted together with the emblems of wealth and superior-

ity of the countries they are the representatives for. A contradict-

ing image is hidden until you view the painting from a specific

angle, but when you do a human skull becomes visible, the sign

of mortality. Selander lets the image oscillate in and out of vis-

ibility; the painted image emerges as in a rupture of light in the

dark whilst mumbling voices count – numbers, years maybe. 

The sound fragment is a loan from Chris Marker’s 1962 film La

Jetée – another important point of reference. The films narrative

tells the story of how a man is used in time travel experiments

in order to save the world. He travels through sediments of

memory and images, much in the same way as Selander’s film,

only to return to his beginning.

The references to Holbein and Marker are subtle points of de-

parture in the film, as is the history of silphium. From these

points the film unfolds in an essayistic narrative, in which the

artist make use of image material and sound from different

sources – her own footage and still images, quotes and archive

material. The Stasi archive and museum in Berlin as well as

the Museum of Natural History and Archaeology in Trondheim

have been important sources. A deep interest in the notion of

image as memory, imprint, representation and surface is at the

core of the work. The appearance of the image, the fact of its

existence in the first place, its relation to the seeing and the

gaze and to image technology, is never unquestioned. 

Helena Holmberg (2014)

LENIN’S LAMP GLOWS IN THE PEASANT’S HUT

Lina Selander’s film installation Lenin’s Lamp Glows in the

Peasant’s Hut is a work with many points of entry. In the text

piece which is part of the exhibition and may be viewed as a

sketch for the film that constitutes the main component of the

installation, she likens the conceptual content of the film to

a number of mineshafts, various vertical movements that are

joined together and create a system of meanings into which

viewers may descend.

One of these shafts and one of the film’s points of departure is

the 1986 nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, Ukraine. While mak-

ing the film, Lina Selander visited Pripyat, the town founded

to house workers for the nuclear power plant, and, on site,

photographed the contaminated zone. She also gathered mate-

rial from the museum in Kiev that administers the historical

heritage of the accident.

The film begins with a sequence of images from the approach

over the snow-covered countryside surrounding Kiev. The

ground below floats away in a horizontal movement while Se-

lander establishes the vertical movement that corresponds to

the distance between the viewer’s gaze and the ground far be-

low. These two movements recur in several aspects of the film.

Pripyat is located on a tributary of the Dnieper, upstream from

Kiev. On the shores of the Dnieper is also where the 1928 film

Odinnadcatyj [The Eleventh Year] by the Soviet film director

Dziga Vertov takes place. The film, which celebrated the tenth

anniversary of the Soviet state, depicts the construction of a

power plant, focusing on electricity as the prerequisite for the

development and progress of modern society. The title of Se-

lander’s installation is borrowed from an intertitle in Vertov’s

film and the artist also uses footage from The Eleventh Year

in order to connect the utopian dream from the first decade

of the Soviet state with a contemporary set of problems in

regard to modern society’s insatiable need for power and its

consequences, as well as with the role of the mediums of film

and photography in this development.

Vertov’s famous statement, “I am the machine /---/” echoes in

Selander’s film. The human being as machine, a component

of the social structure, is a consistent theme that addresses

the reduction of the human being to labour, subordinated to

ideological systems. Against Vertov’s Soviet workers who radiate

youth, pioneering spirit and enthusiasm, the artist places images

of the liquidators – decontamination workers – who, after the

nuclear disaster, were despatched to dig a tunnel under the reac-

tor and who all died shortly after, from injuries sustained. The

montage is completed with pictures from the museum in Kiev

and from Pripyat’s abandoned schools, houses and hospitals.

The historical parallel that Selander draws between the Soviet

power plant construction and today’s dead zone in Pripyat is

carried forward through an image of a Scythian grave borrowed

from Vertov. The image, which in Vertov’s film functions as a

reminder and a continuation of the proud heritage from a long-

Lenin’s Lamp Glows in the Peasant’s Hut (2011)Vitrine (steel, glass and wood) with 22 radiographs (90 x 500 x 36 cm)

Lenin’s Lamp Glows in the Peasant’s Hut (2011)Continuous HD-video, b/w, 23 min

gone civilisation, establishes, in Selander’s work, a historical shaft

that extends much further and deeper down into a pre-historic

time. A series of pictures of plant fossils and drawings of how the

original forests may have looked find their counterpart in nature

images from Pripyat, a place where human history has come to

an end and where nature has been left to heal itself.

The millions-of-years old fossils included in the film may be

read as the first images. They are images without human in-

terference, without purpose, but still razor-sharp impressions

of a reality long gone. They have an indexicality reminiscent

of that of the photograph. Present here, among other things,

is a trace fossil, a so-called Cruziana, which preserves the dig-

ging movement from a pre-historic trilobite. The Cruziana is

a depicted movement, the first film image, as it were.

Like Vertov, who regarded the film medium as a tool in the

construction of society, Selander points to the development

of photography as part of modernity. From the fossil, the first

image, the work continues to delve into mining, the rails as

a symbol of expansion and power, electricity as a symbol of

knowledge, enlightenment and efficiency, and, more precise-

ly, and connected to film and photography: the silver mine,

Roentgen technology, the camera. The camera lens is a tunnel

in which light travels; the movement is the prerequisite of the

image. If the vertical movement of the mineshaft points to

history and to the descent, the many horizontal movements

of the film – tunnels, corridors – are geared towards the film

strip and the camera’s objective lens. In images from the ar-

chives of the Swedish Museum of Natural History, the walls

are covered with documents and preserved objects. Against

the corroded light, reminiscent of the photographic flash

light, which Selander often places central in her images, the

history is outlined.

Another indexicality is created in the photographic work which

is part of the installation. Selander has had rocks containing ura-

nium emit their radiation onto photographic paper, a method

that points to how nuclear radiation was discovered by the

French scientist Henri Becquerel during his experiments with

photographic plates. Here, the photographic image is not just a

propaganda tool in the service of modernity, but directly con-

nected to the scientific discovery that made it possible to har-

ness nuclear power as an energy source. Radioactivity is also a

movement; the radiation is a relocation of energy. In Selander’s

photographic work the uranium-containing rocks have been

exposed onto the photographic paper, resulting in black spots

reminiscent of the after-images that emerge when one looks

into a bright light for a long time.

Helena Holmberg (2011)

MODEL OF CONTINUATION

Model of Continuation is based on the invisible core of the visible

inscription, the image as an interior object and its relationship

to seeing and various reproduction technologies. In my work I

have attempted to follow an idea of the illusion’s beginning in

the simple fact of images, like radioactivity or leakage between

layers: vegetation and sporadic work outside the window, the

room, the studio environment, the lonely plants, as well as the

projection with its different layers of time. A camera is disas-

sembled in a studio in front of another camera whose images are

then projected in the same studio, and re-filmed. The material

is lent an experience that interferes with and modulates that

which the camera does not contain: the images. 

The eye witnesses the end of its role as witness. Images will be-

long to the technologies that generate them. We are at a distance.

In Hiroshima things and people were erased in a flash. Their

shadows were impressed on the city’s surfaces (plants, the man

on the staircase). The flash of the atomic explosion can only

be witnessed at the cost of one’s eyesight or life. Under some

conditions, we can see. The sound from the whistle and the

scene at the end is from the film Children of Hiroshima (Ka-

neto Shindô, 1952). Some images have been borrowed from

Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959) and Hiroshima

Nagasaki August, 1945 (Erik Barnouw, 1970)

Lina Selander and Oscar Mangione (2013)

THE HOURS THAT HOLD THE FORM (A COUPLE OF DAYS IN PORTBOU)

is an installation with a video on a projection screen and a

reel-to-reel tape recorder, loudspeakers and some chairs.

The film, which is in black and white, shows motives

from the Spanish-French border town of Portbou, where

the philosopher Walter Benjamin took his own life the

night between the 27th and the 28th of September 1940.

The border had closed the day before he arrived and was opened

again the day after his death.

The images, both moving and still, are accompanied by a voice

that tells different stories of refugee-hood: fragments, details,

thoughts. Both the video and the sound are looped, but of

different duration, this brings about a multitude of relations

between word and image which both exposes and bridges the

distance between them. A continuous shift of perspective that

shows that a comprehensive narrative is never possible. Eventu-

ally, the images are perhaps more related to the voice than to

the stories it tells.

The title, The Hours That Hold the Form, is a quotation from

One-Way Street by Walter Benjamin, and the text continues:

have passed in the house of dreams. The images from Portbou,

where I spent ten days in the summer of 2005, witness to such

hours, they are documentations of simple things: a restaurant,

the old Custom House, the railway station, tracks, trains, the

Benjamin museum... At the same time they are form, ordered

The Hours That Hold the Form (A Couple of Days in Portbou), (2007)Continuous b/w and colour video projection with sound, projection screen, chairs, 15 mins

Sound on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, 14 mins

by a more or less open system of significance, the film itself and

the varying relations to the stories. In one way, the images in the

film are simple containers of any form, in another way they are

precisely the form they become. It is a border which is explored

in a documentary as well as in an abstract way, in a meeting

between history and present, between meaning and silence.

Lina Selander and Oscar Mangione (2007)

AROUND THE CAVE OF THE DOUBLE TOMBS

The double tombs in the title are situated in the Ibrahimi

mosque in Hebron. The tombs of Abraham and Sara, a holy site

for Jews, Muslims and Christians. A site that in itself contains a

duality – half mosque, half synagogue.

The frame work of the film is the way to the mosque, a way that

passes a number of control stations and cordons, the last one

inside the mosque itself. The image of this last cordon is con-

fusing, what we see resembles an incinerator or a dumpster. A

sheet-iron construction with two blind openings. The way to the

mosque leads through a divided town, on the surface and in lay-

ers above each other. We move on the bottom, both in a literary

meaning and in a wider sense. This is a way and a place that can

only be described as a bottom layer. The camera is directed up-

wards, towards a net that stretches between the houses, towards

what feels like a water surface. We walk as under water – it’s the

kind of image you see when swimming under water, looking up

to the surface. The images are again confusing, but in another

sense than the still image from the mosque. Initially hard to

read, to orient yourself within. The unusual perspective and the

instability of the camera create a fretting feeling of inconsist-

ence. When understanding the image, one is horrified. Due to

the lack of stable ground under one’s feet, the water surface

appears as the only thing real. The net, the expression of the

horizontally divided city, is what’s solid and real in this bottom

layer. Against the net silhouettes of objects are visible, objects

thrown down by Israeli settlers onto the Palestinians inhabiting

this bottom layer. The objects appear as black images towards

the sky above, the sky we are separated from.

These are the only moving images in the film, but they remind

of still images, the kind of photographs that are not real pho-

tographs but what is called photograms. Images which appear

if you put light on an object resting on a light sensitive paper, a

method which doesn’t make use of a camera and a negative, a

direct imprint, a more direct indexicality. On the photographic

paper the objects appear white as burn marks, they are absent

but has left their mark directly on the material. In the mov-

ing sequences of the film we wander below a kind of inverted

photograms, not white but black imprints, a series of black signs

which form a wordless and violent text. /---/

The bottom layer of reality investigated in Lina Selander’s film

is a place without future, without hope. Is that why the camera

Around the Cave of the Double Tombs (2010)Continuous b/w HD-video, silent, 16 mins

Anteroom of the Real (2011)Continuous colour HD video, silent, 14 mins

is moving forward so reluctant, spasmodic and uncertain? Is the

forward-looking gaze, normally an aspect of the film as medium,

plainly not possible here?

Helena Holmberg (2010). Excerpt and translation of text

published in OEI #59.

ANTEROOM OF THE REAL

The film takes its starting point in the deserted town of Pripyat,

located within the zone of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. A

pair of hands flip slowly through a pile of photographs: images

of a model of reactor 4, buildings in Pripyat, books in deserted

offices, empty rooms, trashed interiors, pictures of a TV monitor

showing a documentary about Chernobyl, etc. As the timelines

of the still and moving images cross, the film raises questions

about what an editing room is and can be, and about narrativity,

time and images.

Lina Selander (2011)

WHEN THE SUN SETS IT’S ALL RED, THEN IT DISAPPEARS

The work takes Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film La Chinoise as

its starting point. Originally it is an installation in three parts: a

series of almost entirely black-and-white stills, a film showing

the shadow on a wall of a moving foliage of a tree, coloured

red, and a voice reading a text. It examines the relationship

between political, utopian and emotional expressions in words

and images, it explores the revolutionary zeal of a time and the

desire to start all over again

La Chinoise is a film in the making, a film that tells the story

of a revolutionary and truth-seeking common narrative while

at the same time trying to be a part of it, sharing its inherent

expressions and problems. The installation is also a work in the

making, engaging and evolving around Godard’s film and the

questions it addresses and responds to. But it is also an installa-

tion about photography and storytelling.

Most of the photographs in the series of stills are from the

1968 student revolts in Paris and Stockholm, taken at meetings

and manifestations. But they also show other motifs, such as a

close-up of a growing blob of moisture on a news reel show-

ing Chairman Mao swimming in the Yellow River, personal

photos and some stills from La Chinoise. All images have been

photographed with flash and all photos have a white circular

reflection on them which may represent or constitute a com-

mon space where the spectator’s space and that of the motif

overlap, but where they are also defined as separate – a blind-

ing dazzle or hole in the image which ultimately blocks any

final narrative and forces itself into the motifs and events that

are being documented.

Lina Selander (2008)

TO THE VISION MACHINE

The film was the beginning of a larger work on the visual in-

scription’s invisible centre, a process that led to the production

of Model of Continuation (2013), a work that in parts makes

use of the same material.

The starting point is the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, or

more precisely: the detonation of the atomic bomb as a photo-

graphic event. The first atomic bomb created a flash that lasted

one fifteenth of a millionth of a second. The light penetrated

every building and shadows of objects and bodies were ex-

posed and burned onto the city’s surfaces. When bodies and

objects turned to ash, their traces were left as unintentional

monuments. The sound of the whistle and the scene at the end

is from the film The Children of Hiroshima (Genbaku no ko,

1952), which shows the Peace Memorial Museum while it is

under construction after the U.S. occupation had ended and it

was allowed to remember the disaster again.

Lina Selander and Oscar Mangione (2013)

Model of Continuation (2013)HD-video, 24 mins, colour, sound and mute

Lina Selander (b. 1973) lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. She works mainly with moving images in film and video, but also with photography, text and sound. Her works are often installations in which these different medias converge and interrelate to one another. She is interested in the image’s ability and lack of ability to reproduce time, experience and memories and she explores how narration is created and how different techniques transform a story. Her works investigate film as medium, examining its possibilities and limitations as form of expression, and they often raise questions about history, media archa-eology and authenticity.

Selander’s work has been shown at Index - The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation,  Moderna Museet, Kunsthall Trondheim and in interna-tional group shows such as Manifesta 9 in Genk, Belgium and the Buch-arest Biennale 2010 and at Haus Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Upcoming exhibitions include Seoul International Media Art Biennale, Momenta Art, New York and INIVA, London.

· · ·

Helena Holmberg is based in Stockholm and Trondheim, where she since April 2013 is the leader of Kunsthall Trondheim, a new institution for contemporary art. The activities include exhibitions, programmes, colla-borative projects, residencies, and the establishing of a permanent space for the institution, planned to open in 2016. She was earlier the curator for Index - The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm.

Recent projects include Image at Work (Xposeptember 2010 – exhi-bitions in collaboration with institutions in Stockholm and publication OEI), A Complicated Relation (Index and Kalmar Konstmuseum 2011), Lina Selander: Lenin’s Lamp Glows in the Peasant’s Hut (Index 2011) and the publications Manon de Boer – Encounters (published by Van Abbe museum, OEI and Index, 2013) and Lina Selander – Echo (published by OEI and Index 2013).